YouTube obviously understands what’s going on hardware wise as they have just introduced the “Feather” Beta. It is a lean mean version designed to run on netbooks/low-powered PCs running on low-bandwidth connections. Designed to watch videos with the lowest latency possible by limiting the features available to viewers & reducing the amount of bytes downloaded by the browser.
Changes include the player defaulting to standard quality, comments reduced to 10 and you loose the ability to share & embed. The auto-suggest search bar and related videos have also been removed. We like it in cafe’s with sketchy internet connections, if your multitasking on your netbook or if you have an older generation. If you’re rocking the ION netbook please disregard this post and continue your high resolution graphics.
But take a look for yourself, YouTube “Feather” opt-in beta here. Just click on the “Join the ‘Feather’ Beta” link.
